“But this is a history class!” The high school junior had a good point. What were we doing exploring creative writing in a U.S. history class? And since this student probably spoke for others in class, I decided to win them all over with a poet: “As Emerson said, ‘Our best history is still poetry.’” Blank stares. Current assessment theory indicates that teachers must include student voices in the assessment process. Instead, I said, “Just do the assignment. I promise that you will love it once it’s over.”
My first experience with multi-genre writing was as a fellow of the South Coast Writing Project. The teacher who presented this idea used Tom Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style, in which the author writes, “A multigenre paper is composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by theme or topic and sometimes by language, images, and content… A multigenre paper may also contain many voices, not just the author’s.” In essence, students use their own imaginations to create, in this case, historical sources.
For the history classroom, a space almost wholly dedicated to expository writing, this means encouraging students to have creative interactions with the past. As part of our discussion of the social movements of the 1960s, I assigned students to create at least seven genres, either creating people and giving them voice or using historical individuals and imagining what they might have said. After brainstorming a massive list of genres, students inserted their own voices into the past. Some of the most imaginative included the following: a Yelp review of Woolworths during a sit-in, Richard Nixon’s own version of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” a ghost story about the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, a Stonewall haiku, and a shopping list for the grape boycott.
The most revealing moment was when students reflected on the process. One said, “We have written essays before, but I never felt as though I was in the mindset of the time until we wrote these genres.” Another student wrote, “Sometimes history feels dry—this brought humor and life to the story.” Finally, one student said, “We already knew the facts of the 1960s—now we were able to give life to the people who lived through them.”
James Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I know that some students feel the same way. As historians grapple with the steady decline in their major, they should consider the possibility that the problem is the pedagogy and that the solution is to employ the literacy strategies that creative writing and composition teachers use every day to bring texts to life.
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Brett Jordan Schmoll’s poetry has appeared in Orpheus, Mojave Heart, Rabid Oak, and Writing Sound. He has also written for the Journal of Appalachian Studies and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. He teaches in San Luis Obispo, CA, and plays guitar in a teacher band.